Thinking people have always tried to reconstruct the past. Investigators do so to try and catch the criminals. Historians do so to explore the past and see how that can help the future. There are many other kinds of thinking people who try and reconstruct the past as well for their own reasons. No matter who is attempting to reconstruct the past or what their goals are, everyone who is trying to reconstruct the past has some basic obstacles to bypass in order to come to the truth. These obstacles include but are not limited to a limited amount of evidence, and the knowledge that the evidence one has may not be entirely truthful.
At a crime scene, an investigator has very little evidence to work with. He or she can see that it will be very difficult to determine what has happened and when. However, this investigator must do his or her job in order to put criminals behind bars. The investigator will then start to take what little evidence he or she has and try to decipher what he or she can to try and figure out what happened in the past. If he or she is able to do decipher the evidence well, then the investigator has a chance of determining the true outcome of the events. Historians have much of the same challenges. They must look at the little evidence that is left behind by the people of the past. Then they attempt to decipher that evidence in order to see who these people were and what their lives were like. If historians are successful, then they will have a view of the past based on the evidence that they have. The difference is that investigators are under a time constraint while historians can have all the time in the world. This limits the amount of time that investigators are allowed to spend deciphering. This makes the investigator rush to reach a verdict. Such an action can lead to the lack of convicting evidence or the incorrect outcome. The only time constraints that the historians have are the ones that they place onto themselves. This leads to a proper amount of evidence and a better chance of deciphering that evidence correctly. However, there are still other issues that hinder the proper acquisition and translation of evidence.
In this acquisition of evidence, historians, investigators, and all thinking people should notice that most of the evidence that they acquire are collections of human actions, words, and ideas. They should also realize that humans are habitually incorrect in their interpretations or recollections of past events. When people take down their memories of past events, the person that is recording said information, he or she interjects his or her biases into the information that is being put into a permanent record whether it is consciously or not. This action morphs the information into something may be only slightly different but it also may turn out to be a complete fallacy. Therefore, the evidence that is acquired by the historian, investigator, or thinking person should be viewed as a possible inaccuracy. This places a doubt into the mind of the investigator as they are gathering evidence and testimonies. As the evidence grows in size so do the discrepancies among the different sources that are available. Investigators view these discrepancies and try to cross reference what they know to try and determine which parts of the evidence are true and which parts are fallacies. Historians and thinking people do much of the same thing but again, investigators have time constraints that others do not have. Either way it is still very difficult to try to determine what is true, what is not true, and what information is only partially true.
In pondering both of these difficulties that are involved in reconstructing the past, one must realize what a truly daunting and difficult task this must be. However, historians and investigators all make money somehow which indicates that they either learned to ignore those issues to then continue to reiterate unknown truths or unknown fallacies, or they have found good and sound ways to determine whether or not the information that they receive actually has some merit to it. This makes one wonder what exactly they do in order to decipher that evidence. The easiest way to combat these problems is to try and collect as much evidence as possible. Then when one has all the evidence they can gather he or she is able to examine the contents of each piece of evidence to gain information. Then he or she will compare all of the evidence that is there to other evidence to see where there common themes or where there are contradictions. Then the investigator, historian, or thinker examines the sources of said evidences to determine whether that source is valid or not, or at least more valid than other sources. Based on the information that is viewed and pondered over, the investigator, historian, or thinker will be able to thread the evidence together to form a cohesive reconstruction of the past.
No matter what kind of evidence it is or how much evidence one has, the outcome will never be perfect. People are never perfect and therefore the information they leave behind will never be perfect. Therefore, even the best historian, investigator, or thinker will never be able to reconstruct a perfect representation of the past.
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